White Death

by Daniel Blake

  One small breakthrough: a connection between Columbia and Yale. The Columbia Lions football team had played Yale Bulldogs in New Haven the previous Saturday. Even that, however, seemed to lead nowhere. The Columbia team had stayed in New Haven the night before the game, on Friday, but had returned home after the game on Saturday. None of the team or its support staff had been in New Haven at the time of the murders.

  Travelling supporters? Very few. The Lions’ home attendance was by far the worst of all Ivy League colleges; not surprising when you considered how hopeless the team were. The Lions found it hard to muster 1,500 people for an average home game, and less than 100 had made the trip to Yale last week. All but one of those had returned to Columbia the same night, and the exception had stayed up to spend the weekend with his girlfriend, a Yale sophomore.

  Yes, they’d been together all weekend. The girl’s neighbors were adamant, their testimony shot through with equal parts annoyance and admiration at the prolonged sexual symphonies resonating through the walls. After all that, it was a wonder the guy had had enough energy to eat breakfast, let alone go out and murder someone.

  But there’d been no events at Columbia last night involving anyone from Yale. So maybe the timings of the murders were sheer coincidence.

  ‘Coincidence’ isn’t a word that homicide investigators like to hear.

  They’d also found out a little more about Dennis Barbero. Columbia was hoping to extend its campus into the largely Hispanic Manhattanville neighborhood to its north. Dennis hadn’t just joined the local Manhattanville protest campaign: he’d ended up running the damn thing. He’d addressed rallies, chained himself to railings, demanded audiences with congressmen and senators.

  The expansion plans were incompatible with the need for affordable housing in Manhattanville, he’d said: they represented nothing but more forcible gentrification, more unthinking white property appropriation. Publicly, the university authorities had said they welcomed dialogue and debate, and valued Mr Barbero’s freedom of speech even – especially – when his opinions were opposed to their own.

  What they’d thought privately might have been another matter entirely.

  Breakfast done, Patrese and Dufresne went back to campus around nine. The campus was no longer locked down – only Hartley House itself – and the morning shifts of both precinct and campus officers had taken over, putting up notices and buttonholing students as they passed. Did you see anything? Do you know anything? All information confidential. Phone this number or talk to an officer.

  There was a crowd around the entrance to Hartley House, as there had been last night, but Patrese could see instantly that the mood was very different. Where people had been shocked and tearful, now they were angry. Their bodies made angular lines of self-righteous defiance; their voices came in shouts, barks, growls. A couple of TV crews were filming them. Patrese spat out a curse. TV crews always made these things worse.

  Dufresne walked over to the nearest uniform, exchanged a few words with him, and came back to Patrese.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Patrese asked.

  ‘People getting real pissed now. Say the police been hassling them.’

  ‘There’s been a murder. The fuck do they expect?’

  Dufresne shrugged. ‘They’re students. Always think they know everything. Student who knows they don’t know everything is like a woman who don’t nag: a strictly mythical creature. You know how it is. We can’t do anything right. We ask questions, we’re hassling them. We don’t ask questions, we don’t care ’bout some dead black guy.’ He gestured to one corner of the protest. ‘Some fools over there, they’re stirring things up even more. Saying Dennis was killed ’cos he took it to the man.’

  ‘The Manhattanville protests?’

  ‘I guess. You ask me, they just want to make him a victim.’

  Patrese thought for a moment: then he started towards the posse Dufresne had indicated. One of the TV cameramen came closer, lens tracking Patrese as he walked. A reporter shouted a question. Patrese ignored them both. He was tempted to tell them to butt out altogether, switch the camera off, but he knew that would cause more problems than it solved.

  The students Dufresne had called stirrers were a mixed bunch: a handful of black guys dressed in the kind of low-slung pants that always made Patrese want to pull them up and tell the wearers to look smarter, but also some white and Asian kids with backpacks and earnest faces.

  ‘I’m Franco Patrese. I’m with the FBI. Is there anything I can help you with?’

  You could try not sounding like a damn shop assistant, he thought to himself.

  One of the guys with Rikers pants stepped forward. ‘You goin’ round aksin’ all the students if they killed Dennis, but why ain’t you investigatin’ the administration?’

  ‘We’re following several lines of enquiry.’

  ‘That’s what the police always say. The administration hated Dennis, man. Hated him. He was a pain in all their asses. You gotta talk to the president, the provost, the vice-presidents, all the trustees. I’m at law school here, and you know what they teach us? Cui bono? Who benefits?’

  ‘I know what cui bono means.’

  ‘Then go look, man. You keep on hasslin’ the students here, this thing’s gonna blow up. We ain’t afraid of protests at Columbia. We got a long tradition of that shit.’

  The cameraman took a step toward them. Patrese kept his voice calm.

  ‘Sounds to me a little like a threat.’

  ‘Everyone got the right to protest, man.’

  ‘You know your rights, huh? What about your responsibilities? What about your responsibility to let us do our job? I didn’t just tumble out of high school and find myself in the Bureau. I worked hard, I got trained. I know what I’m doing. All the officers who stop and ask questions, they know what they’re doing too.’ Patrese clapped his hands, raised his voice. ‘Listen up. All of you.’

  The crowd noise rose, subsided. Patrese spoke into its ebb.

  ‘I know you’re all upset about what happened last night. But please: let us do our job. You got any thoughts or information, ring the number on the noticeboards all around campus, where a trained officer will take your call. I ask you: disperse in an orderly fashion, and this whole thing will get solved quicker.’

  For a moment, Patrese thought it had worked: and then the shouts went up, police trying to cover things up, just another nigger dead, and all that. This was the Ivy League in the twenty-first century, Patrese thought, not sixties-era Kent State: but this wasn’t all about race, he realized, this was students kicking against the system, and that was as old as education itself. He wanted to tell the protestors that in a decade’s time they’d be rich bankers or lawyers, and they’d sure as heck want the police to come quick enough when their condo got burgled: but he didn’t think that would do any good right this moment.

  The crowd jostled and surged. It seemed to have grown bigger. A couple of campus police officers came hurrying over from outside the library, radioing for back-up as they did. If he wasn’t careful, Patrese thought, he’d have a full-scale riot on his hands.

  Someone was leaning over the barriers, trying to attract his attention. A black guy with dreadlocks. Looked like Kwasi.

  Not just looked like Kwasi, Patrese realized with a start. It was Kwasi.

  ‘Hey, Franco,’ Kwasi said, as though they were meeting in a coffee shop rather than on the fringes of incipient public disorder.

  Patrese went over. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Saw it on the news. Same guy who killed my mom?’

  ‘Think so. I was going to call and tell you.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

  ‘What question?’

  ‘What are you doing here? You wanted to talk to me, you could have rung me.’

  ‘Thought I could help.’

  ‘Help?’

  ‘Sure. Calm things down a little.’

  Patrese almos
t laughed. Only Kwasi, with his weirdly direct logic – some form of mild autism, perhaps, maybe Asperger’s – only Kwasi could see a student protest and think he could help. Patrese opened his mouth to say, ‘Thanks, but no,’ and in that exact moment thought: Well, why not? It could hardly make things worse, could it?

  He opened the barrier for Kwasi to squeeze through. Dufresne’s eyebrows practically attained escape velocity. ‘What the …?’ he mouthed.

  ‘Trust me,’ Patrese mouthed back, though in truth he wasn’t sure he trusted himself.

  Kwasi walked to the building’s entrance, where the whole crowd could see him.

  The transformation was amazing. Aggression drained from the chants as though a plug had been pulled. In its place came the happy shock of unexpectedly seeing a properly famous person up close.

  The crowd whooped and hollered. ‘Hey! Kwasi! Kwasi! Over here, man!’

  Dufresne came over to Patrese. ‘Never seen nothing like this.’

  Kwasi held up his hands. The crowd quietened. Give him a beard and a robe, Patrese thought, and he could have been Jesus.

  ‘My mom was killed last weekend.’ Kwasi spoke slowly and carefully, picking each word with care: not a natural orator, but perhaps the more effective for that. The protestors saw he was speaking from the heart. ‘Whoever killed her also killed Dennis, and another guy too. Agent Patrese, the Bureau guy who’s here behind me, he’s leading this case. He’s a good guy.’ Patrese felt the start of a blush. ‘He personally came to tell me about my mom, and he stayed with me that day, looked after me, when he had a ton of other things he needed to do.’

  Kwasi paused, swallowed, continued. ‘You guys here, Ivy League college kids: it’s a hell of privilege, what you’ve got here. I got turned down. Went to UMBC instead. Kick-ass chess team, but the rest of it, nothing like this place. All of you, show you’re as smart as everyone thinks you are. Do me a favor. Let the police get on with it, let them find the killer, we can all get some closure. Do what Agent Patrese said, and disperse.’

  And that’s exactly what they did.

  19

  An hour later, Patrese felt he’d done all he could here. Kwasi had given interviews to the TV stations on site and gone back home. Forensics was in the hands of the NYPD, who’d promised to let him know the moment they had anything. Since the central incident room was in New Haven, Dufresne said he was happy to come up there any time to help work on things. And New Haven was where Patrese needed to be, running things.

  His car was at the precinct house, twelve blocks north. A squad car would have given him a lift, but Patrese wanted to walk: stretch his legs, clear his head. Too much coffee and too little sleep were making his face feel like it was about to slide off. He wondered vaguely whether he was safe to drive. If he wasn’t, there were stops on the interstate. He could always pull in and doze off if need be.

  He’d walked no more than a half-block when a car pulled up alongside him. Not just any old car, either. A white Rolls-Royce. The nearside rear window opened soundlessly.

  ‘Agent Patrese.’

  ‘Mr Nursultan.’

  ‘You have moment?’

  ‘If it’s going to help me solve a triple homicide, then sure. If you’re telling me I’ve won the state lottery, also sure. Otherwise, no.’

  ‘Maybe both.’ The door swung open. ‘Please. It’s important. If it save you time, I can take you to where you go. We can talk on the way.’

  So much for clearing heads and stretching legs. ‘OK.’ Patrese ducked his head, stepped inside the Rolls, and settled himself into the black leather. He felt as though he were Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places, being made his offer by the Duke brothers. The door swung shut again.

  ‘Where to?’ Nursultan asked.

  ‘West 126th.’

  Up front, the chauffeur nodded. Traffic parted as the car slid away from the curb. You saw a Rolls, you let it in, even in New York. Especially in New York.

  ‘I get you something?’ Nursultan was the model of solicitousness. ‘Whiskey? Cigar?’ Again with the Duke brothers shtick.

  It was barely mid-morning. ‘Thank you, no.’

  ‘You have a good, how you say? Thinking, make things up.’

  ‘Imagination?’

  ‘Yes. Imagination. You have a good imagination?’

  ‘Listen, no disrespect, but I’ve had two hours’ sleep, I’ve got police departments in two separate states to deal with, and I’m not in the mood for riddles or obscure questions. You got something to say, say it. I was enjoying my walk. I’m happy to enjoy it again.’

  ‘OK. In Theater at Madison Square Garden in six day, at eleven seconds past eleven minutes past eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ – the detail clearly pleased him – ‘I press a chess clock, I start biggest match since Fischer and Spassky. Twelve games in three weeks. Five thousand seats for each game, all sold out. Every single seat. I could have sold each seat four, five times. I have announcers and cheerleaders, like in boxing, no? I have big screens to show players’ faces close up, so spectators can feel the emotion, see the agony. I have live TV coverage, every move. I have grandmasters analyze for audience, best graphics in world.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And right now, I have none of this. I have none of this, because Kwasi King give me sixteen pages of demands and won’t discuss a single one with me. You want to know these demands? I tell you some. For Tartu, only one flavor of yoghurt per game, in case his seconds try send him, er, message through the flavor, through which flavor they choose. Electronic sweep of theater for devices, you know, bugs, before every game. Board to be this size, pieces this weight, table this high. And on, and on, and on.’

  Patrese gave Nursultan a long, appraising look. If he let Nursultan intimidate him, he’d never get him off his back. He’s the money, Patrese thought, but I’m the law. Remember that. Always remember that.

  ‘I guess you stand to lose a lot of cash if this doesn’t go ahead.’

  ‘Of course. Not only me. Sponsors, venue, insurers …’

  ‘Don’t ask me to feel sorry for insurers.’

  Nursultan laughed. ‘Even insurers not feel sorry for insurers. Yes, people lose money. But you know, money just money. For me, what I lose, I make back, two minutes on stock market. For me, much more important here is chance to blow chess up, make it explode, make it huge. Fischer could have done it, but he too mad. Kwasi, everyone love him: but if he play now, he seal it forever. The game, not only him. This most important to me. This greatest game in world. I want every child to play it. Kwasi, he only one who can inspire. I see him on news today, with the protestors. You there with him, you see it too. He has it. The gift, the touch. Now imagine: this kid, this chess, er, messiah, very cool, very weird, his mother just killed, he play anyway …’ Nursultan clicked his fingers. ‘Hollywood, no? It’s Hollywood.’

  Patrese made a conscious effort not to let his jaw drop. ‘You want to make capital out of this? You want to play on his tragedy? You’re sick.’

  ‘No. Not sick. Real.’

  ‘Real?’

  ‘Real, how you say? Realistic. Kwasi do same, too. Every time something bad happen, he make advantage of it, he turn it round so best for him. That one of reasons why he so good.’

  ‘So why isn’t he doing it now?’

  ‘He try to get as much from me as he can.’

  ‘Christ!’ Patrese slammed his fist on the seat. ‘His mother’s been murdered. If he doesn’t want to play chess, then … I wouldn’t want to play either, in that situation.’

  ‘Chess not your whole life. For Kwasi, his whole life. Match right now is good for him. Take his mind from his mother.’

  ‘You care about his health now? Spare me.’

  ‘I not care what you think of me. But I need help. From you.’

  ‘From me? What do you expect me to do about it?’

  ‘You find man who did these kills, you give Kwasi, how you say, peace of mind.’

 
‘One less reason to keep holding out on you, you mean.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I don’t think it’ll make any difference to him. His mom’s dead. Catching whoever did it isn’t going to bring her back. He’ll play or he won’t. That’s between you and him. And anyway’ – Patrese mimicked Nursultan’s voice – ‘“You find man who did these kills”? What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do? I’ve thought about nothing else for the past six days. You’ve got any bright ideas as to who it might be, do let me know.’

  ‘You can make arrest, no?’

  ‘I can make hundreds of arrests. Not much good if they’re all the wrong guys.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘They wrong guys. So what?’

  And there it was. Patrese had felt that Nursultan was leading up to this, but he wanted to be sure, he wanted to hear it loud and clear.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what you want?’ Patrese said.

  ‘You bright guy. You know what I want.’

  ‘I’m sure I do. But tell me anyway. Just to be sure.’ He saw the hesitation in Nursultan’s face, and knew what it was: a doubt about how freely they could talk without comeback. Patrese went on. ‘Oh – if you’re worried about recording devices, don’t be. I came straight from my hotel last night. I’m not wired, I don’t have a digital recorder, nothing. So say what you want.’

  ‘And if it not what you want to hear?’

  ‘Then it’ll be your word against mine. And I’m sure you have very good lawyers.’

  Nursultan considered. ‘OK. I want you to make arrest and press charge, so you can say that you catch man who killed Regina King.’

  ‘Who would you like me to arrest?’

  ‘Homeless. Junkie. Criminal. Any like that.’

  ‘That’s obstruction of justice.’

  ‘Sure. Is serious offense. So I compensate you. Big.’

  ‘And that’s attempted bribery of a federal official.’

  ‘Listen. If this match in Kazan, and I want arrest, I have a thousand policemen who do anything for this kind of money.’

  Patrese leaned forward and tapped on the partition. ‘Stop the car, please.’ He turned back towards Nursultan. ‘I don’t wanna sound like an asshole, but … no, actually, I don’t give a fuck what I sound like. This match isn’t taking place in Kazan. It’s taking place in New York City, and I don’t take to being bribed by you or anyone else. I’m not perfect, but I am honest. That means something to me.’